The present invention relates to a positioning apparatus for a mounting operation of two-dimensional planar optical elements.
With the recent progress in the semiconductor process techniques, planar optical devices such as surface emission lasers, MQW planar spatial optical modulation elements, and pnpn optical switching elements, and two-dimensional arrays thereof can be considered for practical applications. It is expected that such elements will be applied to the fields of optical communications and optical information processing, which essentially demand multichannel systems, by utilizing not only the velocity of light but also the nature of the light that light beams do not interfere with each other.
For such a purpose, techniques of mounting optical semiconductor elements and optical components are important. For example, optical fiber communications have been enabled with the advent of an optical module as a block formed by integrating components in an appropriate scale. As such an optical module, a module for a one-dimensional LED and a light-receiving element, an advanced type relative to a module for a single element, has recently been studied and developed for application to, e.g., a data link between computers. However, studies of modules for two-dimensional planar optical devices or mounting techniques for the realization of such modules have just begun, and hence there are many problems to be solved.